Paint–fail.

Didn’t get all that much done this weekend…we chose to relax most of Saturday. Ate nice meals. Drove around and looked at property. Talked. Solved all the worlds problems at one time or another.

Sunday, we trimmed some trees and did the final prep on the sunroom for paint. “Trimmed some trees” is actually harder work than it sounds…didn’t even get to all that need it…and still ended up with a metric ass-load of limbs to drag around and cut up/burn. For the curious…a “metric ass-load” is the equivilent of two American shit-tons. Anyway, that’s another story involving sharp whirring things and fire…and perhaps prefaced by the statement, “Hey y’all, watch this!” so I’ll save that for another time.

Anyway, Monday…I was going to paint the sunroom before we came home. Since I really expected to get this room done…oh…say…last friggen August…I was looking forward to finally spraying the primer.

Loaded up the Wagner Paint Crew plus with a very good quality primer, did a final clean and mask of the room, fired everything up, and viola…no paint.

The unit will not come out of prime mode. While IN prime mode the pump runs and returns paint via the return hose to the tank. When I put it in spray mode it continues to do the same. Sigh.

The troubleshooting guide for the unit lists several things and the fix…except on this one it says, “return unit to an authorized Wagner repair center”.

Great. And I followed…meticioulsy…the cleanup and storage instructions. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work…but it doesn’t. Looking at how it seems to work…and how the prime/spray valve “feels”…I expect there’s a bit missing from the cleanup/storage directions…namely don’t leave that valve on “prime” for long term storage.

Any repair at the “Wagner Authorized repair center” would cost as much as I paid for the unit I expect…so I guess I’m going to attack this mystery part myself (the prime/spray valve) and see what I can see. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Pestilence? Famine? Dogs and cats sleeping together?

Oh, and of course it’s out of warranty. I have sprayed perhaps 3 gallons of paint with it.

Intensely frustrating. I don’t need tools that fail unexpectedly with little use/wear and this one is supposedly aimed/marketed at just my market/level of use…

Even more frustrating as I was VERY pleased with how this machine performed when I used it before. It made a very difficult painting job a snap…and since I have several more “very” difficult paint jobs to get to…I really need it to simply and without any drama…just work.

I’ll abscound with the wife’s dining room table tonight and take this sucker apart. I’ll keep you posted!

Oh…and a lesson learned…when starting up a airless rig that’s been sitting a bit…try water first (if spraying water-based paints). That way, if it doesn’t work or needs some repair, you don’t have any serious cleanup to do.

Me? I had as much cleanup to do as if I had painted the entire room.

At least the fact that it was full of expensive and messy white primer kept me from kicking it’s sorry ass clear across the yard…